Harry's Last Stand Newsletter

About This Recording As 2025 comes to a close, despair overshadows hope for 2026. It has been a year of harsh economic and geopolitical cruelty. The ongoing cost-of-living crisis makes food, housing, and small joys unaffordable. This year, genocide was normalised, and fascism became mainstream politics in the West. It’s doubtful that we can escape the cul-de-sac neoliberalism pushed us into withou...

Four months before he died in 2018, my father, Harry Leslie Smith, made a series of videos for the UNHCR. He knew ignoring the Refugee Crisis or responding to it with indifferent cruelty would portend fascism return to power in the West. The videos were about his memories of the refugee crisis in Europe following the defeat of Hitler’s Germany. The images from those last months of the war — and th...

On my laptop, I found a fragment of audio of my dad recalling the final months of the Second World War. As it’s Remembrance Day, it feels right to share it. His generation went to war on the promise of a tomorrow that wouldn’t repeat the hell of their Great Depression youth. They didn’t fight for empty symbolism or the hollowed-out democracy we endure today. They fought for a democracy built on th...

It’s World Refugee Day, but the majority of folk don't care because the corporate news media had them suckling on hate and ignorance for so long that they forgot what empathy feels like. People no longer know why they should care for humanity's displaced. Not a day, week, month or year reserved for Refugee Awareness can alter the xenophobia that now consumes society. In Gaza, famish people are lur...

You can almost set your watch on public healthcare's destruction by our political and business class. It will happen within the next few years. Keir Starmer will kill it in Britain. Canada's provincial premiers are killing it with the speed of drowning a kitten. Neoliberalism corrupts any politician who manages to grab hold of the greasy pole of power of government. Canada's Federal government, wh...

It's the beginning of August 2024- and a pogrom against Britain's Muslim and refugee community is underway. Unlike Nazi Germany's Kristallnacht against its Jewish citizens, the violence against Muslims and refugees in Britain over the last few days is not sanctioned by the British government. Although the entire political and news media class have much to answer for as to the reasons this early Ba...

June 5th is the 10th anniversary of Harry's Last Stand publishing day. Here are some quotes from Harry Leslie Smith about his thoughts about life in the 21st century. The podcast episode is about Harry talking about austerity in his youth and in the present day. He speaks about Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson and the rise of fascism. Harry's Last Stand Newsletter is a reader-supported publication. To...

Apart from the fact that these times have rendered me impecunious, I detest them most because they leave none of us with enough spare moments to reflect and ponder how to stop our annihilation by neoliberalism. I have included a podcast now on my Substack because I want to preserve in one place my dad's audio recordings. I believe it is essential that voices like my dad's and mine have a platform...

 In June of 2018, Harry Leslie Smith predicted he would be dead before Christmas. He was 95, and his body was tired from old age and the relentless work schedule he undertook for the last five years of his life to do his Harry's Last Stand tour, "to not make his past our future." He was exhausted and physically weak after being battered by an unforgiving and persistent lung infection. In July, des...

Whether it is Christmas or any other holiday, the only gift I can give you is the gift of my memories and those of my father. For me, telling these stories is a means to make sense of the darkness the world has entered. I honestly don't know if there is a way out of this cul de sac neoliberalism has pushed us into. But if there is, it will be done by remembering our working class history honestly,...

This week has begun as if it were the opening lines of Homer's Iliad. A terrible war is about to become even more deadly because pundits and politicians sing lyrically about just causes, the need for divine retribution and offences that can only be punished by the mass death of more innocent bystanders. There is no climb down from this. It is just like in 1914, just like in 2003, and just like eve...

Over the last 18 months of his life Harry Leslie Smith recorded a series of audio tapes. On them, he spoke about how the 21st century was beginning to resemble the Great Depression world of his youth. "I refuse to remain quiet while the world my generation built turns feral in the hands of right-wing populists and capitalists indifferent to the wellbeing of ordinary workers. Too many people died,...

Last Friday Volodymyr Zelenskyy addressed Canada’s House of Parliament about his nation’s defensive war against Russia. It was billed as a speech similar to Churchill’s address to Congress in 1941 to plead for weapons to defend the world from tyranny. Problem was in the Parliament’s Visitor’s Gallery was a 98 year old former servant to tyranny and Nazism who was the Speaker of the House’s special...

Transcript Hi there, it's John here. I'm going to steal 10 minutes of your time trying to experiment and see if we can do a podcast on the sub stack. I don't know if it's going to work, but I'm not well this week. So I figured what the hell I got some sort of skin infection above my nose or below my nose, above my lip and then on my lip and I've been scrofulous. So we've got that out of the way. T...

Democracy to those who are struggling, and there are millions of us, looks more like road kill at the side of a highway. It's not working out for the ordinary citizen the way it is working for the entitled in our society. 2023 has become the year that governments normalised the cost of living crisis, the privatisation of healthcare and war without end. I am not surprised all this happened, and nei...

I know I won’t live as long as my father. But if I can last as long as my Mum and die at 70, I can finish the tasks I’ve set out for myself to complete the Harry’s Last Stand Project. But even if I just get 5 more years, I will use it to finish as much as I can. So have a listen to my reasons and my motivations about why I’ve literally given my life to this project. The tasks I’ve set out for myse...

Hearing my dad's voice from a podcast he taped long ago is bittersweet. But today, I found this on my computer in files marked Dad. The audio is from the end of 2017 when my dad Harry Leslie Smith Christmas talked about today's austerity and the austerity he endured as a boy in the 1930s. He taped this podcast a few weeks after returning home from his Don't Let My Past Be Your Future book tour. It...

Hello again, it's John Smith, and this is the audio version of Harry's Last Stand. For the next 8 minutes, I will be conversing with you about Mental Health, yours, and mine, and how we all are stressed out; from the pandemic world, we must live in. How couldn't we be? We live in a time of plague, the war in Ukraine and the pestilence of poverty that will make millions hungry this winter. So, plea...

This is the first episode of my Harry's Last Stand Podcast. It will be a twice-weekly 8-minute hit that deals with preserving the legacy of Harry Leslie Smith, as well as discussions about the cancer that almost killed me and still could. It is about living in a time of covid while being on the knife edge of insolvency. It's about trying to keep, your head above water when your youth has fled you...

The Second World War haunted Harry Leslie Smith until he died at 95 in 2018. I know this because I was Harry Leslie Smith's son and caregiver. I spent many evenings listening to the reminiscences of that time and how the Great Depression and that war forged his character and made him a socialist. In his last years, my dad couldn't shake from his memories the terrible images he saw as a young man o...

In the fading light of an English summer sun, on a quiet beach located on our southern coast, I watched the tide break upon the shore and surge back towards the deep. Its roar drew me to the water's edge where I cooled my bare feet, like I had done in 1927 when I visited the sea for the first time. Then, I was a bairn of just four on a bank holiday outing to Southport with my parents and older sis...

“Upon your return from Calais, you met with Jeremy Corbyn in his parliamentary office and told him what you saw there. It appalled you and him that the desperate of the world were treated with less respect than recyclable rubbish. From your trip to Calais until your death two years later, the plight of refugees tormented you. In them, you recognized all the mistakes and sins of Neoliberalism come...

When Angela's Ashes came out in 1996, I remember telling my mum that I had read the book. But I was thirty-three and still filled with the piss and vinegar of youth. So, at that time, I was insulated from much human tragedy by my age, the colour of my skin, and my gender. I remember I said something flippant to her about the book. I can't recall what it was. But, it was probably a funny, cynical a...

“During Covid 19, I had much time to reflect on whether your Last Stand impacted left-wing politics. I am not sure it did. Politics like entertainment are filled with endless content today, most of which is superficial. To the policymakers, I reckon you were a mascot dog that could be dragged out to inspire people, but hopefully not too much. In the hearts of ordinary people, you carved a spot, bu...

“Today, we must be vigilant, we must be vocal, we must demand that the NHS will always remain an institution for the people and by the people. We must never ever let the NHS free from our grasp because if we do your future will be my past. I am not a politician, a member of the elite or a financial guru, but my life is your history - and we should keep it that way. So say it loud and say it clear...